Accommodated Animal
Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales
Shakespeare wrote of lions, shrews, horned toads, curs, mastiffs, and hellhounds. But the word "animal" itself only appears very rarely in his work, which was in keeping with sixteenth-century usage. As Laurie Shannon reveals in "The Accommodated Animal", the modern human / animal divide first came strongly into play in the seventeenth century, with Descartes's famous formulation that reason sets humans above other species: "I think, therefore I am". Before that moment, animals could claim a firmer place alongside humans in a larger vision of belonging, or what she terms cosmopolity.
With Shakespeare as her touchstone, Shannon explores the creaturely dispensation that existed until Descartes. She finds that early modern writers used classical natural history and readings of Genesis to credit animals with various kinds of stakeholdership, prerogative, and entitlement, employing the language of politics in a constitutional vision of cosmic membership. Using this political idiom to frame cross-species relations, Shannon argues, carried with it the notion that animals possess their own investments in the world, a point distinct from the question of whether animals have reason. It also enabled a sharp critique of the tyranny of humankind. By answering "the question of the animal" historically, "The Accommodated Animal" makes a brilliant contribution to cross-disciplinary debates engaging animal studies, political theory, intellectual history, and literary studies.
About the Author
Laurie Shannon is associate professor of English and the Wender Lewis Teaching and Research Professor at Northwestern University.
Reviews
"No other early modernist prosecutes a case with the exactitude of Laurie Shannon, whose ethical attention to the exercise of rights and authority informs every word she writes. With acumen and grace, she reveals the presence of a zootopian constitution, in which humans and other animals were all included within the scope of meaningful justice. Beyond issuing a potent challenge to the common practice of reading animals as metaphors for human behaviors – and thereby radically revising our interpretations of central texts – she opens a capacious window onto the cosmopolity of early modern culture" – Valerie Traub, University of Michigan
"In this wonderfully written and deeply researched book, Laurie Shannon unearths in early modern culture what teems beneath the generic designation, 'animal', to which we have become accustomed over the past four hundred years: a wild and woolly 'zoography' of fish and fowl, 'beasts' and 'brutes', nonhuman agents and four-footed actors, all cheek to jowl with human beings as 'fellow-commoners' in a trans-species polity, where questions of sovereignty, tyranny, and justice bear directly upon how we treat nonhuman beings. Ranging across legal, literary, philosophical, theological, and scientific texts, 'The Accommodated Animal' finds posthumanism very much alive and well, avant la lettre, in the early modern period's soul-searching attempts to secure our place among the remarkable variety of life that challenges our most cherished and self-flattering biases about the human animal" – Cary Wolfe, Rice University
